Bedtime Story

by Robert J. Wiersema

  “Chris? Where the hell are you?” Jacqui’s voice was ragged, and I could hear the thickness of tears in her throat.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, adrenaline surging, burning off the vestiges of unexpected sleep.

  “David’s had another seizure. Where the hell have you been?”

  I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and my heart plummeted. 8:51 p.m.

  “There has to be a way,” David cried.

  “Maybe,” Matt said as the raging river filled the small chamber.

  “What?” David said. There could be only seconds before the wall collapsed.

  “This might not work—”

  “Matt,” David warned, as another ripping sound echoed through the chamber, a crack suddenly running to the opposite corner of the wall.

  The spirit drifted close to him, the mist coalescing into a face, looking back at him.

  “Do you trust me?” Matt asked.

  David nodded.

  “Then breathe out. Push all the air out of your lungs.”

  The stone screamed as the wall cracked again. The solid rock seemed to bulge under the river’s pressure.

  David tried to focus on his breathing, on pushing all the air out of his lungs. He flexed his diaphragm until it hurt, until he felt completely empty.

  “Now breathe in,” Matt urged him. “Breathe deep.”

  The air rushed into his empty lungs, sweet and cool.

  The mist in front of him dissipated, as if blown asunder by the force of the water.

  “Now run!” Matt screamed, as the wall exploded.

  I darted out of the elevator, my bag swinging on my shoulder as I raced toward David’s room, and I didn’t even see Jacqui as I rounded a corner.

  “Chris,” she called from behind me.

  When I turned around she was standing motionless, her arms folded across her chest. Her face was pale, except for the red, moist patches around her eyes.

  “Where were you?” she choked as she stepped toward me. She pushed against my chest, slapping it with the flat of her hands. “Where were you? Where …?” She kept repeating herself, kept slapping at me. Fresh tears rolled unchecked down her cheeks.

  I did nothing to stop her.

  When the anger gave way to anguish, she fell into my arms, small and defenceless, her back heaving.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I lost track of the time.” I couldn’t tell her what I had actually been doing: I had to add another lie.

  “I can’t do this alone,” she whispered.

  “Is he okay?”

  She shook her head. “He’s bad. He’s really bad.”

  My eyes slipped closed as I tried to fight the sense of vertigo that came over me, the feeling of the world opening up under my feet like it might swallow me whole.

  “It was the worst one yet. I had to come out here while they …”

  “Should we go back in?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

  Two nurses and a doctor were leaning over him, their backs to the door. Jacqui and I waited. When they straightened up and turned toward us, I had to look away. I could never have prepared myself for the sight of my son.

  David was the same white-grey as the hospital sheet. His lower lip was thick, bloody and swollen, and stitched in a wide U almost its complete width. It looked like a second smile, a black, rough line under his lips.

  “He bit through his lip,” Jacqui said. “And his tongue. There was blood … there was blood everywhere.”

  I brought my arm up around her shoulders, eased her closer to me.

  His hands were twitching and flexing. There was a new leather strap across his chest, holding him fast to the bed.

  “He dislocated his shoulder as well,” Jacqui choked. “It took four orderlies to hold him down so Jane could give him an injection.”

  The doctor looked familiar, and he stepped toward us. “Mr. Knox, I’m Dr. McKinley. I treated David when he was admitted the other night.” The doctor from the ER. “I’m guessing that Jacqui has brought you up to speed.”

  “A bit,” I said.

  He nodded. “I’ve got a call out to Dr. Rutherford. He should be in in a bit. I’m—” He paused, as if trying to decide how to proceed, and whether he should. “I’m very concerned about the increasing severity of the seizures that your son is suffering. We’ve got him on Dilantin—that’s a powerful anti-epileptic.” He shook his head. “With the dosage he’s on now, we should be seeing a reduction in the attacks.”

  He glanced at his watch, and at his colleagues who were standing between him and the door. “I’ve got to get back down to the ER, but if anything happens—” He looked at me, then at Jacqui. “Have me paged.”

  The moment the doctor and nurses were out the door, Jacqui dipped a tissue in the plastic cup of water and brought it to David’s lips.

  “Hey, Davy,” she said, her voice a singsong whisper. “Let’s get you cleaned up a little bit, okay? I’ll be gentle.”

  She touched the tissue to his lips, lifting the blood away in the subtlest of increments. How many times had I watched her scrub something away from David’s mouth with a tissue, dampened with the tip of her tongue? But never with such attention, such tender care.

  “It’s not coming off,” she said, in a voice I had never heard from her before, a sound of barely suppressed anguish. “It’s not coming off.”

  “It looks okay.”

  “It’s not coming off,” she said, her voice breaking. “I can’t do it,” she wept. “I can’t get it off. I can’t do it. I can’t do anything.”

  The wall exploded. Water smashed through the chamber. The remaining shades, drifting near the edges of the room, dissolved with the force. The torch winked out, plunging the chamber into absolute darkness.

  David stubbed his toe on the edge of a step, stumbling a little, catching himself with the hand not holding the cylinder. A wind out of the chamber urged him up the stairs as the roar of the water grew behind him.

  He held his free hand out as he ran, wishing he still had the torch. It was so dark, and he didn’t dare slow down. His hand and shoulder bounced and scraped off the stone walls as the stairway twisted upward.

  He could hear the water coming closer, the full force of the river swallowing the Sunstone’s chamber, then forcing itself up the narrow stairway, the pressure building and building, like soda foaming up into a bottle’s neck. He could picture the water bursting out of the cave and washing his battered body all the way back to the castle.

  His chest burned and heaved; his legs screamed in agony.

  “Come on, David,” Matt’s voice urged, very close to him. “The water’s getting closer.”

  “I know,” he gasped, through gritted teeth.

  The staircase, which had seemed endless when he was climbing down, seemed even longer now. And then a hint of light appeared far above his head. He redoubled his efforts, knowing that the end was in sight.

  The water was so close now that he could smell it, a cold metallic odour that would have made him choke if he had been able to take a deep breath.

  “Almost there,” Matt said. “Almost there.”

  With every step the light grew larger, brighter, a sliver of warmth seeming to expand as he watched it, until it resolved itself into a doorway, a tall rectangle of daylight.

  David threw himself through it.

  The light was almost blinding, but David couldn’t stop. Tucking the cylinder into his shirt, he ran across the entry chamber, the thunder of the river seeming to surround him now. The water exploded through the door at the top of the stairs, a silver-grey jet that shot into the room.

  The wall of water chased David across the stone bridge, down the short corridor, and, without even a momentary pause, right off the edge of the canyon wall, into the cool air above the river.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered into David’s hair, worrying that someone might overhear. Chris had sent Jacqui, tearful still and barely coherent, home in a cab
to get some rest. “I’m sorry. I meant to get back, I really did.”

  He was aware of how pathetic it all sounded.

  “Can I make it up to you a little?” He reached for his bag and pulled out the book. “Can I read you a little bit now? I know it’s late, but I thought you might like to hear some anyway.”

  He started from where they had left off the day before. As he read he kept glancing up, comforted by the way David’s hands stopped moving as he read, the way his body relaxed.

  He read longer than he should have, long past the point where the words stopped making sense, long past the point where his mouth stopped moving, where the words stopped coming from him.

  The next time the nurse checked on David, she found Chris asleep in the chair beside the bed, an old book fallen open on his lap.

  The nurse smiled to herself and thought of small mercies as she checked David’s pulse and temperature, taking care not to wake his father. When she left, she dimmed the light and closed the curtain as quietly as she could.

  As David’s feet stepped into the air high over the river, he thought of two things.

  The first was those old cartoons that his dad had made him watch with the coyote and the roadrunner, when the coyote runs off a cliff and hangs, motionless, in the air for a moment, until the full reality of his situation hits him, and only then, with wide eyes and scrambling feet, does he fall with a puff of dust.

  And he remembered his swimming instructor from last summer, that day his class had first gone off the high-diving board.

  “Right now we’re just jumping,” he had said. “No fancy diving. And no belly flops.” Everyone had laughed. “Keep your body straight, and your feet together. You can wrap your arms around your chest if you want, it doesn’t really matter.”

  David did as he had been told.

  “Take a deep breath, and remember, stay relaxed. Don’t tense up. That’s how people hurt themselves.”

  David inhaled as deeply as he could and willed his legs to soften, his knees to unlock. He didn’t let himself think about how high up he was, or the possibility of rocks in the river under him—there was nothing he could do now but close his eyes.

  He entered the water with a cold, sharp shock. He had to fight to hold his breath, and flailed instinctively, struggling against the current to get up to the surface.

  His breath exploded from him the moment he reached the air. He took a deep breath, struggled to open his eyes.

  He didn’t have time to take another breath before the water from the cave crashed down on him, pushing him deep below the surface of the river, spinning him out of control.

  VI

  I GOT BACK TO MY apartment at about four-thirty the next morning. It was cold and quiet, the way I had liked it when I used to come in every morning to write.

  I sat at my desk.

  If Took’s granddaughter had no idea about To the Four Directions, I’d exhausted every possibility, hadn’t I?

  I flipped through the notes that I had been taking, and it occurred to me: every possibility save one. The e-mail from the rights department at Davis & Keelor had been useless, and I knew that I probably wouldn’t hear from them for weeks, if at all. I’d need to get their attention in a different way.

  I quickly scanned the bookshelves behind my reading chair. There it was: The Last Family. I had reviewed it the year before: I had been expecting another trashy true-crime book, but I had been surprised. The book was a surprisingly well-written history of the Marcelli crime family from Sicily to New York, and an account of the life and misdeeds of the author, Anthony Marcelli. His decision to become a federal informant, and the brutal, damning testimony that had brought down his family, followed a crisis of faith right out of classical tragedy. I had praised it in my review, and I hadn’t been alone in my assessment. The book had spent several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

  I flipped directly to the Acknowledgements.

  I skipped past the usual stuff—though one had to admire a mafia traitor who nonetheless thanks his family—scanning almost to the end before the sentence that I was looking for jumped out at me.

  “And finally, my editor, Tony Markus, without whom this book would not exist.”

  Tony Markus—I’d forgotten his name. He’d gotten a lot of coverage in the trades when the book was camped at the top of the charts—the young editor who, for his first book, had gone after a mafia soldier, a confessed killer, and convinced him to write the story of his life and crimes. That sort of thing gets you noticed in the publishing world, and Markus had been hailed as a wunderkind, heir apparent to a generation of editors on their way into retirement.

  “But what have you done lately?” I muttered as I searched his name online.

  The answer, as near as I could tell after going through the first six pages of mostly obscure results, was nothing. In the year since The Last Family had been published, Markus had not been credited with publishing or acquiring anything remotely of interest.

  I clicked on the Contact button under his bio on the D&K page and took a moment to mentally compose my opening line.

  I titled the message “Possible Future Project.”

  Mr. Markus,

  My name is Christopher Knox—I’m a writer and freelance journalist based in Victoria, BC, Canada. I’m approaching you because I was an admirer of The Last Family. You may have seen my review in the Vancouver Sun.

  Back in the mid-60s, Sprite Press (which was later acquired by D&K) brought out four books of young adult fantasy by a British writer named Lazarus Took. You may not be familiar with the name, but at that time the novels attracted quite a following. The books are now, sadly, out of print.

  Given the popularity of young adult fantasy these days—from Harry Potter to the incredibly successful re-brandings of Tolkien and Lewis, as well as the legion of new writers following in their footsteps—it seems to me that the time is ripe for a relaunch of Lazarus Took, a previously forgotten writer who could be introduced to a new generation of readers.

  What separates this from a simple reissue campaign, however, is the fact that there is a previously unknown fifth novel by Lazarus Took, entitled To the Four Directions. It seems that this book was published in a very limited edition in the early 1950s and completely forgotten—it was not published by Sprite Press with the four other titles, and doesn’t appear in any of the online databases or bibliographies.

  In fact, I believe that the Took estate—which I have been in contact with—is unaware of its existence. While C.A. Took, the executor, has expressed some interest in seeing the four previously published novels back in print (and would, I think, be delighted if Davis & Keelor were interested, given the relationship with the Sprite imprint), I have taken this preliminary step of approaching you independently and directly regarding the fifth book.

  I think that the combination of factors is fairly compelling for this project: young adult fantasy is in vogue at the moment; Took’s previously published novels have a proven track record, and would be well received by a contemporary audience; and given the reception and media typically accorded to “discovered” books, I think that this has tremendous potential.

  My first step would be to find out if D&K has any contractual claim to a fifth Lazarus Took novel. While the rights to the previous four books have long since reverted to the estate, there might be something in the original contracts regarding To the Four Directions.

  Mr. Markus, could you please let me know at your earliest convenience whether this project might be of interest? If it isn’t, I’ll need to inform the estate of the existence of To the Four Directions and allow them to put it out to wider consideration.

  With all best wishes,

  Christopher Knox

  I included my telephone number and address and reread the message.

  The e-mail left me with a slightly dirty feeling. I hadn’t lied—there really was a fifth book, and Cat had asked for my help in getting her grandfather’s books back into
print. I never claimed to be working for the estate, or empowered to make deals on their behalf.

  All I was guilty of, really, was using the craven interests of a young editor, probably hungry for his next success and vulnerable to a little flattery, to get access to information that might somehow help David.

  And it might work out to everyone’s benefit, no matter what I got out of it. Fantasy was huge in publishing circles these days, and To the Four Directions could be a huge success, just as I had described. Hell, it had gotten David reading. Wasn’t that the surest testament to its appeal?

  Tony Markus pushed himself away from his desk and spun to face his printer. “Come on,” he muttered, tapping at the arm of his chair. The wait was excruciating, but not surprising: the printer was probably a cast-off from two floors up. Certainly the rest of his office was made up of crap that nobody upstairs wanted.

  At least he had the luxury of a private office, even if rumours and lingering smells suggested it had once been a janitor’s closet. Four walls and a door beat a cubicle every time, and Markus knew that he was the envy of most of his colleagues. If the fast track took him through a janitor’s closet for a couple of years, that was the price to be paid.

  “Come on,” he urged the printer again. When it finally roared into action, he yanked the paper free of the rollers before the machine had even finished.

  He took his time on the stairs. He needed a chance to think this through, to make sure that his story was in place. Plus, he didn’t want to arrive at Sharon’s office winded and sweaty.

  In his own mind, Tony Markus was a solid, imposing presence: not fat, solid. Impressive. The way his uncles were: broad-shouldered and hard, good-looking without even needing to try.

  The reality was somewhat different.

  Despite the slow pace, he was still out of breath by the time he got to the executive floor.